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Overwhelmed by the available chemistry resources? Looking for new chemistry teaching ideas? Elementary Articles is the place for chemistry, education, and everything else.

Elementary Articles is the official blog for the RSC's Learn Chemistry – your home for chemistry education resources and activities.

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Archive for June, 2016
Principia Schools Conferences
Global Experimenters, we need you!

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  • Have you taken part in Mission: Starlight or plan to?
  • Would your students like to talk to leading space experts about their global experiment? (Perhaps to Tim Peake himself, finger crossed)
The UK Space Agency wants to celebrate the imaginative work linked to Tim Peake’s Principia mission that is being done by children of all ages by organising two schools conferences.

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These conferences will take place at the University of Portsmouth on Wednesday 2 November 2016 and the University of York on Saturday 5 November 2016.
Attendance at the conferences will be free, with travel bursaries available to help with the cost of getting to the venues.
Approximately 500 young people will be able to attend each conference. Those selected from the competitive application process will be invited to either give a short demonstration about their work or produce a display to exhibit at the conference.
Applications to attend can be from any individual, or groups of people of school age (up to and including A-Levels, Scottish Highers, BTECs and similar).
All applications must been received at the UK Space Agency by 12 noon on Thursday 15 September 2016.
Please note for a successful application the judges are looking for three things:
  1. What has been done by the students
  2. Why they should come to the conference
  3. What they would present, demonstrate or do at the conference
Find out more here.
If you are unsuccessful with your application to the Principia Schools Conference but are local to either the University of Portsmouth or the University of York please keep an eye out for the Outreach Days.
The Outreach Days will be more interactive, hands-on, for everyone to enjoy and we hope for lots of activities and sharing what you’ve been doing with space in school. We are expecting a lot of interest (especially if, fingers crossed, Tim Peake can be there).

Principia Conference Outreach Days – Tuesday 1st November for the University of Portsmouth and Sunday 6th November for the University of York. These will be open to both the invited school children from the conference day but also to the local schools and general public but it will be a ticketed event – for more information please keep checking this website for updates.

Best of luck.
Posted by Lee Page on Jun 30, 2016 9:37 AM BST
The Royal Society of Chemistry's Global Experiment heads for the stars


Tim Peake wants your students’ help
Has your school, community group or science club taken part yet?

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Introduced by British astronaut Tim Peake, your mission is to investigate materials that block or limit UV light using UV colour changing beads. Our global experiments are designed to challenge all ages and abilities, with resources that are easily sourced and affordable.

Tim’s involvement, along with the interactive nature of the experiments, makes this an engaging and educational way for students to understand just how important chemistry is in our world – and beyond. 
Mission: Starlight also encourages all participants to post their data to our website and receive a special Tim Peake message and participation certificates.

Join the global experiment today and you and your students can be part of something out of this world.

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We have been getting some great feedback via twitter (#globalexperiment) and emails from around the world.

Teacher, after attending a conference at the National STEM Learning Centre, York.
"Great ideas to take back to school. Kids will love these investigations"
 
A teacher from British School of Vila-real, Spain.
"Fantastic.  An investigation we can access for all ages with a focus on science methods and recording results"
 
Teacher, after seeing the global experiment demonstrated at the Cambridge Science Centre.
"I will order some magic UV beads and start some brilliant experiments with the children!"
 
Teacher having attended a Royal Society of Chemistry education coordinators after school network meeting, Blackpool.
"This session was brilliant!  Real-life application using everyday equipment - perfect."
 
Brown Owl, Belfast Girlguiding group leader, Northern Ireland.
“Fantastic experiment we all enjoyed it, science badges all around for our Brownies group”

Are you thinking about running Mission: Starlight but want a teacher / technician’s perspective?

Look no further, the global experiment from the technician’s cupboard

"We regularly run one of the global experiments with our Year 6 and 7 science tiers and this year we performed Mission Starlight. We identified this activity a week earlier to ensure we could collect all the equipment needed.

As technician that job fell to me. The requirements for the experiments are laid out in the guide and involved sacrificing a t-shirt and a sports top for the cause of science. Not too difficult.  Excessive staff room coffee drinking supplied me with enough milk cartons to cut up with no problem. Petri dishes got them lying about - same with tin foil and cling film. Finding sufficient red and yellow cellophane sweet wrappers was a challenge sufficient to promote me to maturity onset diabetes if I consumed the left over sweets, so I resorted to online retailers for my craft supplies and UV colour changing beads.

We had a happy time exposing our UV beads to the black light boxes and pupils were amazed at how fast the UV sensitive beads responded to exposure.  It gave us a great opportunity to discuss how we cannot see this radiation and the effects of UV on the skin. Trying the varying layers of materials for a space visor really surprised the students when seeing how quickly the protection could improve.  It was fascinating to see the reactions of our ‘challenging’ pupils to how useless cling film was at protecting you from UV. Note to self - use sunscreen!

This set of experiments was simple to prepare and easily accessible to the pupils who achieved reproducible results and enjoyed seeing their results on the global experiment map. This is something we will be doing again in the future. Win, win all round!"
 
Science technician from a school in Hertfordshire

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Posted by Lee Page on Jun 21, 2016 9:33 AM BST